The other day, both my wife and daughter asked if I had seen the viral Tik Tok bollard video. “A viral Tik Tok bollard video? Tell me more!”
I was blown away. This one-minute video tells us more about the current status of traffic safety in America than the entire MUTCD manual.
Tik Tok user @Nat.Vacca begins with a simple question. “What…is the purpose of those yellow poles when you pull out of a bank?” Her camera pans across the entire length of her Cadillac Escalade SUV, damaged stem to stern by an encounter with a bollard at her bank’s drivethru. “Bank owners! Look what your yellow pole did to my car!”
Those yellow poles! “Who can even see those things?…I can’t be the only one who doesn’t see them.”
The bollard, of course, was just doing its job, which was to protect the bank’s ATM machine from being crushed by a careless driver. Yet @Nat.Vacca is 100% correct that a 3 or 4 foot tall bollard (the same height as, say, a child) is quite invisible from the cockpit of a modern American land yacht.
It’s really not her fault that automakers have been turning out increasingly larger and heavier vehicles for several decades, enabled by federal policies that encourage bloat. We have collectively chosen to fill our streets with monster trucks whose drivers can’t see normal street features like pedestrians, cyclists, smaller cars or lowly bollards.
With Congress obviously incapable and unwilling to fix this problem, there’s only one solution to address both the rising tide of traffic violence and @Nat.Vacca’s concerns:
Great Big Bollards. Lots of Them.
I’d start with installing Great Big Bollards at all bus shelters. The fact that we don’t protect bus shelters tells us everything we need to know about modern American morality.
These are places where people are meant to wait for a bus just a few feet away from speeding cars. Why do they lack bollards? Perhaps because transit riders are poorer than car driving Americans (see also: the American healthcare system). Perhaps it’s just another expression of our culture’s general disdain for transit. Neither answer reflects well on the ethics of our society.
Not only do we not protect bus shelters with bollards, but they’re designed to crumple when hit by car. They may look sturdy, but they fold like an empty beer can when hit. An alphabet soup of state and federal agencies and various non-profit associations dictate these designs, all of which prioritize the safety of car occupants above pedestrians; a choice with clear winners and losers.
The same is true with almost all roadside infrastructure. You might think, for example, that standing next to the street light at a rail station crosswalk would offer some measure of protection from an errant driver. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Or you might think that standing next to a streetlight would be safer than standing alone on the curb. Again, nope. Streetlights, signs and stoplights are all built with breakaway bolts to protect drivers and minimize vehicle damage. Although they look like Great Big Bollards, they are absolutely not.
So, the next time you’re walking down Nicollet Avenue and you see a speeding car crash into a minivan coming out of the McDonalds drive-through, you’ll want to dive for cover behind a tree, not a streetlight.
Which is why we need to protect all our pedestrian spaces with Great Big Bollards. Car occupants are well protected by their massive weight, crumple zones, and air bags that didn’t exist decades ago when roadway design standards were written. We need to shift the narrative until every corner bodega is guarded by Great Big Bollards, just like the big red balls at the entrance to every Target store.
While we’re at it, let’s put some Great Big Bollards at the entrance to churches, where crowds of people congregate after a service. Let’s protect schools, playgrounds, movie theaters, daycare centers — everywhere people get together to enjoy life outside of a car.
We also need to upgrade the bollards outside of every restaurant, bar, and ice cream shop so that they’re big enough to stop an SUV in its tracks. Narrow metal poles simply aren’t up to the task.
And let’s stop pretending that plastic flexposts do anything at all to protect pedestrians. Install some Great Big Bollards or go home.
Somehow, we need to send the message that it’s not OK for drivers to endanger everyone else around them. Sure, we can all put up signs urging “SLOW!” or “20 is Plenty.” But what we really need are consequences in the form of highly visible, immovable objects that will totally mess up any errant driver’s Cadillac Escalade.
Because what the world needs now is bollards. Great Big Bollards.
All photos by the author